Menu

Links

A new, personalized vaccine is targeting the deadliest cancers in America

New vaccines, targeting the most deadly forms of cancer in the United States, are undergoing trials across the country and being heralded as promising breakthroughs in the growing field of immunotherapy — immune-based treatments that many in the medical research community believe is one of the most promising ways to treat, cure and prevent cancer.
In the last few years, the number of clinical trials in this field has exploded, along with the flurry of money from Big Pharma and investors, stirring optimism in the fight against cancer. Today the cancer therapeutics space is worth more than $100 billion globally. Over the next decade it is predicted that immunotherapies will be the backbone of cancer treatments in 60 percent of cancer types.
According to the American Cancer Society, cancer is the second most common cause of death in the United States, exceeded only by heart disease. In 2018 there will be an estimated 1,735,350 new cancer cases diagnosed and 609,640 cancer deaths in the United States. This translates to about 1,670 deaths per day.
Yet while the drugs are dramatically improving the odds of survival for some patients, much of the basic science is still poorly understood, and trials have had wildly varying degrees of success.

The most common knee surgery for seniors is costly, and usually a waste

The most common knee surgery performed on people over 65 is repair of torn meniscus cartilage. The procedure is costly, at up to $10,000 a patient — and it's also usually a waste, if not outright harmful.
"It's known that this procedure is often done without strong evidence; I don't think it's well known that this is one of the most common surgeries in the U.S.," said Martin Makary, a professor of health policy at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore and author of a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Surgery. "We not only described it, we looked at it in a population every American pays for (through Medicare). That's a price tag and a context I'm not sure people have really calculated."
That giant waste of money could be better spent on other treatments, from something as simple as Advil to more sophisticated courses of physical therapy that will give most patients better results, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine say.
The problem is that there are two kinds of meniscus tears, said David Altchek, an attending orthopedic surgeon at New York's Hospital for Special Surgery and the medical director for the New York Mets. Only one of the two tears, the much less common one, responds to surgery, Altchek said.